This work explores how colonial India imagined human and divine figures to battle the nature and locus of sovereignty.

Milinda Banerjee teaches at the Department of History, Presidency University, Kolkata and is a Research Fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany. He has co-edited Transnational Histories of the 'Royal Nation' (2017), and is the author of two monographs as well as several journal articles and book chapters on the intersections of South Asian and transregional intellectual history.

Acknowledgements; Note on transliteration; Abbreviations; Note on documents used; Introduction; 1. 'Caesar of India': debating the British monarchy and colonial rulership; 2. State is the household vastly enlarged: imagining sovereignty through the princely states; 3. 'One law, one nation, one throne': debating national unity; 4. 'One has to rule oneself': collectivising sovereignty in peasant politics; 5. 'God's kingdom has come': messianic sovereignty in late colonial India; Conclusions and further thoughts; Index.